There is poetics to water, in water, with water, because water. Likely you already know this. Look at a river, read a poem about a river, feel the river while the river’s current guides the poem, impels the poem, insists the poem. And this would be one version of the poetics to water that appears in Harmony Holiday’s dual book, A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father. But what a pedestrian description that would be for this book. Because there will always be poems that try to estimate a river. Who doesn’t want a poem of river like a river flowing? I like Holiday’s book too much to leave my description of her poetics at “river” or “water.” It’s a start. It’s a reasonable opening. I would call attention to the poetics arising when a bucket of water is poured clean from the bucket. That smooth, sinewy line. That feeling that continuous is inside you, inside the water, always being water while it pours onto the ground, or into another bucket, or into a river if you want it to. Who cares where the water is pouring, when you have this glandular muscularity that every moment is reflecting in water.

And it’s not only the force and sustained note in Holiday’s poems that would give them this poetics of water. It’s how these poems cohere via subject, via blues as underlying impulse for poetry, via near homonym that groups thoughts, via a father. An overwhelming presence of father. On one side, Harmony Holiday’s A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father is an ars poetica for her first book, Negro League Baseball. Where Negro League leaves more the impression of “father” on a reader, seeing how an artist with a father who was himself an artist will feel her father present in her work. Now move to Go Find Your Father to understand what father and how father and whether father and if father and when father. I want to keep going father. Because each of the epistles Holiday writes to her dead father just feels like continuing, and I need to continuing, and the epistles even speculating that she will be continuing to write these letters to her father even when this project is through. The voice is just like you’d imagine the writer who wrote Negro League Baseball would write to someone she cared so deeply for.

Dear Dad,

The white horse anchored and rose with such likelihood each go-around on the carousel and I felt like a queen up there alone between whites and lights, a little amber music. How I kept looking for your Stetson towering above all those mediocre heads and herds at the carnivals. Are we cannibals, are we a clan of heroes, or villains, or both? It’s indecipherable. Excellent is a threat here but we go ahead with it. Both sides now.

The poem feels like access, as in access to the daughter’s emotions and needs, with the access being immediate and entire and not mine and hers only and something I want and I get. It feels like that access is borne out of the simple necessity to understand how a relationship with a parent is so essential to how we realize we can be who we are despite and because of our parents. Then add to Holiday’s situation that her father is a cultural figure. Then add to Holiday’s situation that her father is a troubled figure, and whatever complication you might sense in the language of these poems turns out to be exactly what you are yearning for. It’s a complication to necessarily trouble these poems’ emotional availability.

This is why, if I might be so bold as to guide you, future Holiday reader, into your experience of this dual book, I would recommend you start with Go Find Your Father, and then move to A Famous Blues. Not just because Go Find Your Father gives context (i.e. who is this Jimmie Holiday in relation to the speaker, how does she feel about him, how does she feel about the music and the music industry’s position towards him). But because the access to the daughter’s voice is so absolute and entire in Go Find Your Father that any ambiguity in A Famous Blues is understood as necessary and a poetically inevitable sorting through of the speaker’s relationship with her father. Put another way, difficulty offers its own type of access. Compare the previous quotation addressed to her father to the style of A Famous Blues‘ “The Black Entertainer’s Say My Name Blues”:

You know how when the sun is out ’til really late one day every year and he renames your soul to pace while you play Apollo shoulders with your first born self and everyone feels like a nearness/winner/narcissist/ridiculous/charmed-I’m-sure-chanting miss thing chasing her shadow beneath that yellow umbrella where the slow word for mirror rears itself to roar and before you can dwell on it or rest assured or aurora that staggered velocity, his love of your, your lust for the father, you’re busy combating it all not so fast with your fat tongue all over my name like a claw or a bad actor as I shine on the grass in your mouth and you get how–Love is a dangerous necessity. Is this man imitating a movie star?

There is still clear sentiment toward the father, but notice it has been rearranged into a new sensibility that indulgently shifts and realigns its register so that an affection for the father (“he renames your soul” or “his love for you, your lust for the father”) could simultaneously be read as father’s love as well as reverence to Apollo, the sun God, and perhaps, in the Apollo register, it is love for the sun alone, and that sensuality of a long evening in summer when it feels like the sun will never end. Perhaps this gives us some idea of what it feels like to be loved without committing to what the source of that love is.

I like to consider Holiday’s book as an inverse to Jenny Bouilly’s The Body, where Bouilly is absence with the hint of a broader substance playing out in that absence, and Holiday is substance playing out and on and in and alongside and over but not done over until maybe the jazz note would dictate, go ahead do it over. Then Holiday doesn’t necessarily do it over, but just plays it a little bit longer before she drops all that substance on top of the other substance. Maybe I’ve always wanted to envision the kind of text that would be present in The Body, and Holiday’s style and poetics feels like that overflow that would necessitate Bouilly’s footnotes. And in Holiday’s dual book, it feels as though the body of circumstance and emotional complexity is already footnoted, whether it’s through the appropriated texts or her direct reference to black artists. The book feels as though it overflows, and so my impression of water. Which always has felt like jazz in all those organics that keeps moving the jazz around. And that’s Holiday. That was Holiday in Negro League Baseball, but that was jazz lyric poetry. I would say this is jazz lyric voice making sentences you fear will stop, you don’t want to hear stop, or even finish a sentence, because then the sentence is ending.

Unfortunately, I have focused almost solely on Holiday’s style in this review. But it’s because I am sad to be unhearing her words when I’m away from them. The voice in A Famous Blues / Go Find Your Father is so absolute and addicting and completing (Holiday, you complete me!) and enduring. And yet there is a specific politics underlying the poems in this book regarding the “work made for hire” clause in many recording contracts. The poems in A Famous Blues feel like direct confrontations with this fact, but that’s mainly from interspersed texts telling the story of Holiday’s father, Jimmie Holiday. This half of the book spells out the concept of inheritance in concrete and explicit terms. Literally, Holiday has been in dispute for royalties she and her mother should be earning form her father’s song writing. And so the concept of father as artist present in Harmony Holiday’s artistic life takes on a concrete character. It’s a point which A Famous Blues takes further when it speaks to influence with a listing of artists in “Lament for the Brilliance of Wolves.” And I would say it’s this conceptual interlock surrounding the idea of inheritance that allows for so much centripetal motion in the poems. They hurl themselves outward in syntax and content and sentiment and everything, please. Yet they still hold together. Similar to Negro League Baseball, but different, in the absolutely explicit understanding of what lies at the complex center of this dual book.

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/12/a-famous-blues-go-find-your-father-by-harmony-holiday/feed/0Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwoodhttp://therumpus.net/2014/10/motherland-fatherland-homelandsexuals-by-patricia-lockwood/
http://therumpus.net/2014/10/motherland-fatherland-homelandsexuals-by-patricia-lockwood/#commentsWed, 29 Oct 2014 14:00:51 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=132152Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>Are you going to read Patricia Lockwood’s new book Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals? Yes. You can’t help it. Like you can’t help wanting sex, in your brain sex, on your body sex, repetitive sex, again, AGAIN! sex. Are you listening sex. Are you listening to this? Because this is Patricia Lockwood doing the twitter and the pornography and “The Rape Joke Poem” in all the intensities you’re looking for. Want me to ruin it for you? Her mother and father are having sex in the opening poem. In front of her. It’s sex! And not just describing a fatherland indistinguishable from a motherland when the speaker walks into their bedroom. And not just the positions, and the mountains and valleys and DOWN THERE’s that are existing here in the poem. The real sex in this poem and all the poems is voice, insistent voice, keeping saying voice that once it gets started, gets started. Like if every sentence of the poem were actually a metaphor for YES! And some of these poems have long sentences. Some of them have short sentences.

Like imagine if Russell Edson had decided that he was going to make poems that were about the spaces between his sentences. That weird feeling you get in your head when a Russell Edson has ended one sentence, and you’re kind of crazy for what will be in the next sentence. Patricia Lockwood has taken that energy, and spelled it out YES! and then made that YES! a sentence. And for my reading, and for all the poems in this book that make reference to sex, I would say these are sexual poems. Sexual, like the rhythms of sex, the sometimes repeating and sometimes varying rhythms of sex, inside your head there is blood rushing around during sex making other rhythms of sex. When you read Patricia Lockwood’s poems this is what you’ll be feeling.

SEXY! But not sexy, too. “I like sexy,” you say. No problem. Just think of the world as a sex partner. The world populated by taxidermied owls and monuments that have a woman’s curves. There’s curiosity, especially that curiosity. Canada is in the world. And family. “I’m having sex with my family?” Avid sex! Gross! So maybe it’s not about real sex, but figurative sex. The human body has a capacity for paying special attention during sex. Maybe you’ve noticed. Like a stuffed owl in a museum case takes this role on in your brain where it is actually STUFFED OWL! (YES!) with stuffing and weird googly eyes and owl-stiff postures. This is the best owl in the world. You better believe it. It’s important, and it’s only an owl! One time I walked through the Daughters of the American Revolution Museum in Washington, DC lusting after my 70-year old tour guide. I thought about her and me in every room. In different positions, too. That museum trip felt very important. I was paying attention! That’s what I feel in Lockwood’s poetry. Attention and YES! and discovering and the pleasure of discovering and the keen interest that all I want is discovering as the essential part of my life. Like this part of “An Animorph Enters the Doggie-Dog World”:

Discover the power at age eleven. Discover all powersat age eleven. A kittenhead struggles out of your faceand the kittenhead mews MILK, you gasp with itsmouth and it slurps itself back. Yet the mew for MILKremains, you drink it. You think, “I am an Animorph.“ Your sight and your hearing increase, like wheatand the wind in the wheat. Well you’ve never seenany wheat but it sounds good, to you and your newtrembling ears.

Notice here (1) the declarative mixed with the imperative creates a feeling of language nonstop-ness, and (2) the feeling of discovery is compared to a kittenhead growing out of your face, and the kittenhead asking for MILK, and you drinking down that request like wanting and getting to want something are exactly what you need. Then notice (3) how this string of logic actually increases your senses. It’s like sex. But it doesn’t have to be literally sex. Granted, everyone seems keen on a Patricia Lockwood tied to sexuality. But be fun with it, people. Be imaginative sexual. Be courageous sexual. Be thoughtful sexual. Be metaphorical sexual, too.

Because the book is breathing with metaphor. Or panting with metaphor. Or exasperated with metaphor. The book is tired with a metaphor-driven critique of persistent information overload. Everywhere we look it’s the 21st Century. And that means we want to and need to tell everyone that we looked at the world. Take a picture. It will last even longer! We are so acquisitive of this world, and that acquisitiveness creates more information about the too much information already out there. In “When the World Was Ten Years Old,” Lockwood describes a boy who “entered encyclopedias and looted every fact of them and when he had finished looting these he broke into the Bible.” Everything’s mine. I take it it’s all mine.

But a concept like “mine” is complicated for Lockwood. There is a porousness to words, as in a poem like “Love Poem Like We Used to Write It,” where “love poem” and what we think “love poem” could possibly do is exacerbated by all the associations that stick to “love poem,” to the point that our talking about any “love poem” with any kind of certainty just starts to look ridiculous. The now familiar poem “Rape Joke” uses a similar tactic, but with an honesty spliced in with Lockwood’s more typical satire so that the poem doesn’t only comment on the troubling fact “rape joke” is even a term, but also that what happened to this speaker is tragic, what happened is a fucking joke, and “joking” about it allows even more of the tragedy to come to light.

Did you like Balloon Pop Outlaw Black? That part about Popeye? Popeye as method of analysis, as subject, as subjectivity, as analysand, as he’s just a cartoon character, why are you getting so intense on him? The material world is intense, people. It’s reality, and what we look at reality with, and what reality would be if we weren’t looking, and don’t forget the reality when we’re looking right at it. Lockwood is like Jorie Graham as a hummingbird, where if Graham’s reality has a veil separating the abstract from the concrete, and Graham would approach the veil so she could indulge that thin separation between the two, Lockwood will plunge and whip around every part of what makes reality a reality. There’s an abstract to reality, too. Don’t forget. So goes the figure of Popeye in Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. So goes the speaker in Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexual, who wants and then wants to want more if only to make wanting to want more like a trajectory that keeps drawing itself out even while we think that just wanting something will supposedly make it ours. It turns out wanting is another of those porous words. All of this sounds so uncomfortable. It is!

More than one hundred and fourteen years ago, an uprising broke out in China that eventually became known as the Boxer Rebellion. But according to Jennifer Cheng, the movement now occurring in Hong Kong differs fundamentally from that violent, ultra-nationalist Rebellion of the past.

More than one hundred and fourteen years ago, an uprising broke out in China that eventually became known as the Boxer Rebellion. But according to Jennifer Cheng, the movement now occurring in Hong Kong differs fundamentally from that violent, ultra-nationalist Rebellion of the past. Today’s highly-organized movement demands universal suffrage, and, in Cheng’s words, “something even deeper:” it could be a tipping point in the larger struggle for Chinese democracy writ large.

Then, in the Sunday Book Review, Heather Partington delves into Jen Michaelski’s “nuanced” story collection, From Here. Michaelski’s “witty” prose showcases her ability to tell authentic stories from different perspectives. This standout collection deserves our attention.

And in the Sunday Rumpus Essay, Amy Jo Burns tackles the mythology of Midwestern football with a clear eye and a poet’s voice. Burns portrays the unofficial religion of small-town America in redemptive and confessional terms. Football, she writes, “lies so sweetly to generation after generation because it lies so lovingly to itself.”

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/10/weekend-rumpus-roundup-64/feed/0Corporate Relations by Jena Osmanhttp://therumpus.net/2014/10/corporate-relations-by-jena-osman/
http://therumpus.net/2014/10/corporate-relations-by-jena-osman/#commentsSat, 04 Oct 2014 14:00:08 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=131286Corporate Relations today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>The first questions: why here? Why poetry? These are questions that hovers over politics and poetry. Why poetry? Is this poetry? Is poetry going to make a difference? More appropriately, perhaps, does poetry need to make a difference if it’s going to talk politics? In a sense, yes. If a poem is going to talk politics we want the poem to win. Those are the rules made up since Plato, when he made dialogues featuring a guy named Socrates. If Socrates was going to be in the dialogue, he sure as hell better win. Even if he’s drinking hemlock, and he’s talking about the chill of death traveling up his body, Socrates needs to win. He did win, too.

Of course, Osman’s book Corporate Relations is quicker to the argument, not like Plato’s dialogues that are the longest possible path to argument you’ll ever find. Osman’s book is more like a dance-off, where two crews line up on either side of a stage. On one side, we have a set of Supreme Court cases ruling in favor of corporate personhood. On the other side, we have a bad ass mother fucker named Jena Osman, provided “Jena Osman” is the stand-in for willing interrogator, personification of skepticism, and prudent agitator acting on the behalf of humanity. To be clear, this match is designed so that one side’s rhetoric will clearly sound the winning punch before anything’s even begun. Because good political poetry is a fixed game. Political poems are like a bully trickster to the dominant culture. Would there really be any interest in a poem written in support of a Corporation’s feelings or opinions or overall personhood? Politically speaking, would we want to hear that type of poetry? Poetically speaking, could there ever be an argument claiming a necessity for that type of poem? Maybe the closest we can get are the wily luxuries of Frederick Seidel. But, of course, it would be lazy politics to lump exorbitant wealth into the same camp as corporate personhood. Maybe they’re more like a kind-of, should-be cousins relationship.

So we return to the question from the beginning: Why here? Why write this book of poems, and the rhetorical stage it represents? Why put on another David v. Goliath political theater if David (i.e. the American People) are still going to walk away feeling screwed?

Because for all the bravado of a Daily Show with Jon Stewart and all the satirical incision of a Colbert Report, there is something extra that the lyric can add to this argument. If Osman is setting up a rhetorical battle, and we know the argument part of the battle is likely to be won by the bad ass mother fucker in the ring, what are the terms of victory? That corporations cannot possibly be people? If this were the extent of Osman’s argument, this book would fail. That the court has been siding with corporations for more than 100 years? Though this additional information is disturbing, and therefore useful, it would likely be even more useful if it were included in a book called, The Dummy’s Guide to the Supreme Court Screwing Us Over (for 100 Years!).

How I feel this book needs to be poetry, and can succeed most fully in its lyric form, is to open the Bill of Rights as a human document intended to protect humans living in the United States from powerful humans or the organizations powerful humans are often employed by as they inevitably reach past common decency for their own selfish gains. Perhaps these organizations are acting inadvertently. Perhaps they are malicious. (Perhaps Osman tips a little too heavily on the side of a malicious conspiracy argument in this book.) But the strength in Osman’s argument, the dance move her speaker pulls off that is like a windmill followed by a handstand, then elbow stand, then snapped back up into a handstand is the implicit argument made by the order of constitutional amendments covered by Corporate Relations. It’s not only the first amendment at play here, people. Corporate Personhoods have taken the fifth to avoid incrimination. They’ve co-opted the fourteenth for due process!

And with each of these amendments, Osman makes clear the moral consequences of depersonalizing the constitution or personalizing the corporation, however your politics might define this. From the poem “Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission”:

there is no place where an ongoing chill is more dangerouswe couldn’t sever it based on the languagepresumably as a poison pill

these corporations have a lot of moneywe get to that when we get therethey want winners

individuals are more complicated than thatChief Justice Roberts: You have a busy job. You can’t expect everybody to do that. [Laughter]

By the sound of them, these fragments could have been lifted directly from the Citizens United court case. They likely weren’t (assuming that court cases don’t often refer to an “ongoing chill”). Instead, the style and tone make them feel like they are part of a highlight reel that offer a sense of what actually happened in the Supreme Court chamber. In this quote (appearing immediately after Osman has summarized the case for the reader), a sense of the Corporation’s motives (“they want winners”) and what a corporate entity is willing to do in order to achieve its goals (“a poison pill”). Is this comparable to a human motive? The implication here is that any human who acts using one motive alone is going to run into the broad range of complications that come from living around other humans. And so contributing large sums of money to a political candidate for the sole purpose of being on the winning side of an election is not going to be a typical human action.

Osman further complicates what would be the usual debate surrounding Citizens United by introducing Justice Roberts at the end of this quotation. And here, the humanity of our present constitutional circumstances is touched on. These are real people serving on the Supreme Court. Real people employing language in real ways. I.e. real people don’t necessarily act on behalf of what would appear in these circumstances to be most logical or just. “You have a busy job. / You can’t expect everybody to do that.” Who is the you? For my reading, the “you” is Elena Kagan, Solicitor General at that time, who was arguing against Corporate Personhood. And the nature of Justice Roberts’ statement? “Not everybody is as complicated as you, Elena.” Maybe more people are simpletons, Chief Justice Roberts. And I’m glad the Chief Justice of the United States would think so little of the people he serves. Here, again, the benefit of poetry as argument, where the poem gets to aim a type of criticism at individual players in this drama that would not seem appropriate for, say, a book documenting the history of a Supreme Court precedent.

Yes. Corporate Relations should be seen as a bona fide political argument for the left. But the standard for reading a poem like this shouldn’t simply be “it’s making a political argument.” If the poems are going to land the rhetorical knockout, a reader should be willing to gauge how much of a knockout they are. Judged against Osman’s recent books, Public Figures and The Network, I would say Corporate Relations is the hardest of the three for rhetorical blows. But, then, the premise of Public Figures is so much more fascinating. And the poetry of The Network feels so much more open-ended and poetic and hinting at an argument rather than insisting. This points to the risk Osman takes in Corporate Relations: how does one keep explicit political argument from devolving into a rant? Watching Jon Stewart can be so dissatisfying if you think about the content alone. During the Bush years especially, it was a relief to know someone could construct a cutting critique against that man, but he was still our President still making the same illogical decisions after The Daily Show ended. For Corporate Relations, the poem/court cases alone would land that dissatisfying Jon Stewart kind of punch. It’s the imagistic poems punctuating the book, and how they complement to the sequence of amendments Osman addresses that pull Corporate Relations away from pure argument alone. I would argue the poetry is still a bit too directed. Yet it’s that clarity and closure that gives a solid poetic twist to the politics involved.

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/10/corporate-relations-by-jena-osman/feed/0Sun Bear by Matthew Zapruderhttp://therumpus.net/2014/06/sun-bear-by-matthew-zapruder/
http://therumpus.net/2014/06/sun-bear-by-matthew-zapruder/#commentsWed, 04 Jun 2014 14:00:26 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=127149Sun Bear today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>What would it sound like to hear the whole world as it happens inside a Matthew Zapruder? I would venture to say it is a quiet world, a muted world, a world that is loving and that is tender in all its loving. A pressured world. There are always emotions hovering at the periphery of the Matthew Zapruder in Sun Bear, and though those emotions might be on a distant periphery, there is still an impending quality to them. Maybe the clinical term for this is anxiety. And reading Sun Bear, I would say there is a fair amount of anxiety communicated in the poems. So, then, the inside of Matthew Zapruder is quiet and anxious. Or an anxiety mollified. Familiar. Processed. And by processed I mean that psychological processing a mature human being uses to balance and note all the different directions the world might have taken without warning. I also mean processed as in the world plus all the different emotions plus uncertainty plus a sensible perspective plus contentedness, and the poems process all these together to form a single perspective. Like in “Poem for Wisconsin”:

and people askwho are we who seeso much evil and tryto stop it and failand know we are no longerfor no reason worryingthe terrible governorsare evil or maybejust mistaken and nothingcan stop them not eventhe workers who keepworking even whenit snows on their headsand on the bridgethat keeps our carsabove the waterfor an hour

Preceding this quotation, the poem starts by noticing a statue of the Fonz from “Happy Days.” Then the speaker imagines the Milwaukee Art Museum as a robotic bird that could fly out over Lake Michigan. Then comes this protest against Republican governors like Scott Walker. But note the resignation in this protest. We the people try to stop evil and fail, and so we worry. We are in this world, and this world is magical, and this world continues to disappoint us. This is what a world feels like when it’s moving inside us. Or at least inside Matthew Zapruder.

What I’m trying to explain is that the poems in Zapruder’s Sun Bear feel calm, but still tapped with wonder. Trivial circumstances are wonderful. The mind wandering away from the first thought is wonderful. Why does saying something obvious, like what I’m saying right here, suddenly feel wonderful, even if by all normal measures this statement I’m making would normally be judged plaintive or only mildly impressed by the world or nostalgic or even depressive. Because Zapruder is a poet filled with wonder, whose experienced world is equal opportunity populated by real things and imagined things. Maybe it’s not explosive wonder. It seldom breaks his stance. Think more rationed wonder, served in steady half-cup sized portions. The drone of server farms can remind him of bees touching down on a field of magenta flowers. The scent from an unnamed perfume can remind him of a “vast tiny ballroom.” It is wonder controlled or modulated. Like if wonder could be played on a theremin.

For me, this is the driving tension in these poems–the potential wonder up against an active restraint. I would compare it to how I feel listening to the new Arcade Fire album Reflektor. I’ve been an Arcade Fire fan for so long. And that first album Funeral is like a catastrophe of musical joy. It felt every song was no stone left unturned, no emotion unchecked, no absolute release of potential unreleased. The energy is everywhere on every track. I hear that same energy in Reflektor, but the music keeps it below the surface. The music pulls from that energy while holding that energy back. And that’s what I see happening in Sun Bear. This speaker, who can be pushed to wonder at even the slightest trigger, holds just enough of that wonder back so that the poems are playful but not raucous. Disruptive but not chaotic. Content but not jubilant.

I hear a similar method when I’m reading Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda. Both books feel as though they are atop this raw energy, and they have chosen to seal that energy into a box, and that box is the poem. The result is a strangely inert, strangely wonderful, strangely not all the way strange meditative stance. I don’t know how I feel about it. And, quite honestly, I think an ambiguous response is part of the poems’ design. A part of me wants to see the box smashed open. There is another part of me that admires the speaker’s poise in keeping that raw energy contained. That Arcade Fire album, Reflektor? I can’t quit listening to it. And I can’t quit trying to turn the volume up loud enough so that one of the songs might finally unleash. None of them do.

The irony for Sun Bear is that Zapruder regularly disrupts the regular grammatic sense in many poems’ phrasing. Is the term for this anacoluthon? Is it the “self-interrupting sentence” term used by Gerald L. Bruns in What Are Poets For? Please, God, just don’t make it parataxis, the word that has been so broadly used for describing contemporary poetry, we should probably start calling this the Parataxis Age. Whatever you want to call it, here is how it appears in “Poem for Americans”:

When I go to the bankCalifornia mild afternoonfills my framehollow with desireto formally sayAmerican brothers and sisterslet us look upfrom our screens.

This first sentence of the poem is at once sensible and evasive of precise meaning. It is disruptive. How should one punctuate the second line? “California, mild afternoon”? “California-mild-afternoon”? Another disruption: should there be a comma after “frame” on line 3? Of course, for a typical reader of contemporary poems, these are pleasant disruptions. I like how efficiently the poem introduces multiple senses of what is essentially the same meaning. I like being the reader who is actively tending to the poem’s grammatical details. And yet, there is something restrained in this “sentence.” It flirts with the rhetorical pronouncement (“American brothers and sisters / let us look up”), but the rhetoric is muted by a speaker who is “hollow with desire” and who makes it clear he is speaking formally. It pretends to unleash the sentence from grammar, all the while keeping the scope of the sentence in line. Which is how I read the emotional stance of this speaker: content but not happy but feeling happy enough to know certainly that he is content with this life he is living.

Stand tall, Matthew Zapruder, in all your knotted wonders and misgivings. Are you a regular reader of Matthew Zapruder? Many people are. Do these observations about Sun Bear feel familiar to his other books? They should. But I would say that the line between contentedness and anxiety is weighted a bit more on the contented side in Sun Bear. Additionally, the grammatical inflections are a bit more pronounced. I emailed Matthew Zapruder when I was writing this to tell him how much I liked the book, and he was careful to tell me it’s really not him. Come on, man. I want to believe I’ve been on the inside of this speaker. He’s so intimate on the page. Now I feel like all I’m left with is a peep hole. Not that there’s something violent on the other side, like Duchamp’s Etant Donnes. I’m just struggling with this distance between the Matthew Zapruder I thought I was getting to know in the poems versus what these poems actually are: careful and whimsical dances with rhetoric.

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/06/sun-bear-by-matthew-zapruder/feed/0Palm Trees by Nick Twemlowhttp://therumpus.net/2014/05/palm-trees-by-nick-twemlow/
http://therumpus.net/2014/05/palm-trees-by-nick-twemlow/#commentsWed, 07 May 2014 14:00:52 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=126120Palm Trees today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>It’s tricky when poetry starts to form a serious relationship with spent consequence. Because, first, everything’s probably already happened in your poem. What you’re writing about? It already happened. The stapler was stapled. The paper was folded. The grass was grown, and growing, and you cut that grass so the next grass could be grown. But even grass growing might be a site of too much consequence. Or rather too much potential for consequence. And yet that’s where Nick Twemlow starts out in his book Palm Trees. Yeah. Sure. There’s karate at the beginning of this book. And what a gifted, miraculous, fantasy-world karate is in the beginning. There’s the Jonestown massacre. There’s Walt Whitman being Walt Whitman in a state of great singing. But even these moments that are undoubtedly of great moment are reduced to some very heavy negating.

It’s like a George Saunders short story, that’s set in some shitty place with a bunch of shitty people being shitty to each other. And the whole time you’re reading the Saunders story, you’re thinking, am I ever going to get out of this? You’re not. Because we all know that that’s what life is. Which is kind of like high school all over again. High school, that simple structure committed to normalizing expectations, performed by teenagers who think they already figured out life, especially if it involves judging your life. But can’t you see, you’re all just in high school? No, of course you can’t see that, because you’re all just in high school.

So what’s the point to a poetry whose Powerful Implication is Everything Was Done, Is Done, Is Done More Than You Would Have Done It or Could Potentially Do It? The point is that is our culture. That’s dissipation. That’s the special kind of boredom we suffer through when everything we could imagine has already been turned on, the world of information is in continual bloom, and we’re still not satisfied. Is there any doubt that the 21st Century has been spoken for? Of course it has. But who here actually wants the 21st Century? Who wants to be the speaker in “The Hum” or even the cleaning lady the speaker just noticed and who he figured should maybe be treated like she was a human being. No, Confessional Poems of the World, the 21st Century doesn’t care for your measured epiphanies or your suddenly seeing a human as another human like you. Humanity as a concept? It’s spent already. Get the drift! From “The Hum”:

Let us ask her. “I was wondering if you’d let me tape you while you clean.” Does she sleep best after a good night’s work? And yet, what passes for thinking today in poetry, one might call it voyeur porn, is carefully staged to appear to have happened casually, such as in this office, after hours, on the boss’ desk. “I want to be a better person. I want to be known as ‘feeling better.’” Carefully staged to appear to have happened causally, as if one thing always leads to another.

Twemlow fills in the narrative poem formula: Speaker dissatisfied with everyday life. Speaker realizes there is a world around him. He is not the center of the universe. Extra points if he can present an Other that further complicates his definition of humanity in the epiphanic moment. And so the paradox of contemporary poetry, that wants to be so potential about itself, but poetry has already been potential. It has already been human, as in aware of the human beings that make up this world. And poetry has been language, language-ish and non-language-like. So what’s left? If the only thing left for poetry to talk about is shittiness, then maybe we’re destined to a world that can only come alive when we are applying the most severe act of critique.

Nick Twemlow, what’s the point of my life? Is this the poetry of cynicism taken to its furthest degree? I don’t know. But it feels like this cynical, spent consequence is the site of a lot of contemporary poetry. There are the surreal-logic poems of, say, Heather Christle that seem to bloom with wonder, like in the middle of the sentence the speaker can’t help but let the sentence go blooming out of control. Then there are the surreal-logic poems of Nick Twemlow or Brenda Shaughnessy, an image-driven lyric that has been has been brought in to service cynicism. Where the surreal manifesto has been turned approximately 150 degrees (not all 180 degrees! there is hope yet!) to say that this life even when provoked by the active imagination is still this life. How do you write about a culture supersaturated by everything you could imagine? You make poems that anxious. Unnerved. Here, from “Palm Trees / 10″:

Even turning the sheet down, the skeptical alliance of thirsts, man overboard, crack rock making a comeback, so we kept things to ourselves, mostly. All this fuzzy interior, gondola of the mind, from this distance, the mountains appear to be covered in grass. Last night my addiction to you resurfaced, so I detoxed on the U.S. Open.”

A nothing event (like turning down the sheets) is skeptical is inconsequential (“man overboard,” oh, and “crack rock making a comeback” but the speaker doesn’t actually respond to these alarms) is nothing is nothing is nothing is nothing. The Twemlow poems I’m most drawn to are filled with a sublimated anxiety. Like the poems are inside the speaker’s mind numbing and disintegrating and evacuating all the content that should matter but won’t. They are destructive poems. But part of their destruction requires an implicit recognition that the wonderful exists. Unfortunately, there is no validating the wonderful in a world like this. A world filled with cubicle dwellers trying to be human beings. A world where denying yourself any emotion or fascination seems like a pragmatic solution to heavy feelings. And the result to me is like pairing the words dulled and titillated when describing erotica. Life is supposed to be charged with all this energy, but really living life is a strange experience, and sometimes it feel like life is more about coping than living. Does that make Nick Twemlow an erotic poet? Why not?

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/05/palm-trees-by-nick-twemlow/feed/0A Conjoined Book by Karla Kelseyhttp://therumpus.net/2014/04/a-conjoined-book-by-karla-kelsey/
http://therumpus.net/2014/04/a-conjoined-book-by-karla-kelsey/#commentsWed, 09 Apr 2014 14:00:43 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=125020A Conjoined Book today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>I think at this point in the 21st Century we can all agree that the self if not just one self, but an accumulation of selves all grafted onto one another. The idea being that I am one I of many I’s inside me, with all our various relationships to each other, our schedules, our favorite radio stations. I might wake up with I and think something kind. I might regard I with some tenderness, maybe skepticism. That Karla Kelsey’s most recent book, A Conjoined Book, might consider the I from so many different perspectives, blurring lines between the pronouns you, she and I, maybe even smearing a little bit of a he in over the you, all of this is not only germane to 21st Century writing. It is Kelsey’s preferred use of the complication process, what I would label the engine of all Kelsey’s books. Complication around pronoun reference, around a mode of address (like when a speaker is addressing a you that is actually a reflexive “you” and so by rhetorical placement a “you” that is then even more worthy of empathy and compassion), complication, too, around a sense of consequence (especially as it relates to a tragedy). A Conjoined Book is like of a pledge of allegiance to lyric interrogation, and the answers that kind of investigation is uniquely qualified to uncover and, at times, leave covered.

For entry into A Conjoined Book, consider the lyric space between the first and second sections of Kelsey’s previous book, Iteration Nets. It is a space balanced between a condensed stylistics and an effulgent, unspooling generation of world. Graft that in-between space to the speaker from A Conjoined Book, where landscape must be viewed as both setting and expressive canvas. The landscape is actually perceptive of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings, even while it is still the physical landscape where a speaker can walk and reflect. It is like when a river appears in a landscape, it feels as though the river takes over the definition of that landscape. We think of the trees in relation to the river. The new pavilion that was built by the river now belongs to the river. In a similar way, once the landscape appears in Kelsey’s poems, and it is used to help define the speaker’s sentiment, then it starts to feel as though these sentiments cannot not be defined by the landscape.

Which leads to one of the ways Kelsey uses the lyric to blur sensibilities. How is a poet supposed to parse out experience while also simply experiencing experience? Consider this excerpt from “Landscape of Vantage & Soft Motion”:

infused with the chorused sun, melody dying out as dust bluesthe crowd swaying like a canyon undergoing a moment of weather.

This and poems like this are the poems of a submerged voice. They speak with and among a voice that feels like it is below the language, as that voice mines insight from between the fissures of myself and myself. Kelsey’s voice is figured by and within nature. What nature? The nature that feels like the innate, genetic make-up of the poems. The human nature of this speaker very involved in the present and equally involved in the past, and, finally, insistently involved with the ways that the past continues to overshadow her present. And what past is this? The reader will never know except that the picture which evolves in the “AFTERMATH” portion of the book involves a man, woman and a child. And whatever the tragedy they have suffered, it maintains an odd parallel with the second section of the book, a section based closely around Grimm’s fairy tale, “The Juniper Tree.”

Whether it was the extended metaphor of birds caught by a net in Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary or the three distinct poetics employed in Iteration Nets, Kelsey has long been invested in crafting a poetic lens that bifurcates our understanding of experiencing or the experience of understanding anything. In other words, she has been trying to disrupt what we as individuals take to be that continuous self that is constantly observing, sensing, thinking, emoting and talking to the self as though the self were its own other. For me, Kelsey’s previous two books use a more overt approach. A Conjoined Book is more about the insinuation of many concerns played out through a series of observations and concerns that feel as though they happen at different times.

And yet all those different times have been grafted onto another, at least in that sense of grafting that involves the surgical implantation of living tissue. In an interview with Rusty Morrison over at The Conversant, Kelsey explains that A Conjoined Book is a literal joining together of two books. I would venture to stretch this statement from a “conjoining” of two books and claim that the process of grafting is the central action of this book. Kelsey opens her book by grafting one pronoun reference onto another. By the beginning of the book’s second section, Become Tree, Become Bird, Kelsey is grafting language onto language, with asterisk footnotes placed beside certain words for comment or, perhaps, continuation of that line at the bottom of the poem. She grafts history onto fable. And as the book nears its end, Kelsey even goes so far as to graft her reader onto the experience of this book:

True readers always read creatively. Put a penny in the vase. Put a tablet of

fill them with indignation. They may wish to interfere in the heroes’ fortunes”

And it is in this proposed relationship to her reader that I can’t help but return, again, to Iteration Nets. A book that explicates and plays on relationships that might exist among conceptualism, lyric maximalism and erasure in poetry. It is also a book with a clear organizational approach, as though she were offering the reader a clear logical arrangement of the different poetic approaches available to her. For A Conjoined Book, what might Kelsey see as the relationship between her work and her readers? Is it a grafting, so that reader and poem should feel intertwined in sentiment? Is it poem as proposition, where the reader is asked to navigate the lyrical logic? That I feel compelled to these questions when reading Kelsey’s work is what has established me as one of her truly devoted readers. A Conjoined Book only further adds to that sentiment.

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/04/a-conjoined-book-by-karla-kelsey/feed/0On Ghosts by Elizabeth Robinsonhttp://therumpus.net/2014/03/on-ghosts-by-elizabeth-robinson/
http://therumpus.net/2014/03/on-ghosts-by-elizabeth-robinson/#commentsWed, 12 Mar 2014 14:00:18 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=124203On Ghosts today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>What does being a religious poet mean? Because from what I know, I’m supposed to read Elizabeth Robinson through religion, or addressing religion. I understand calling her a religious poet doesn’t mean she has to directly address God as the seat of all paradox (a la Mark Jarman’s Epistles). I’m not sure anyone should read an Elizabeth Robinson book if they are needing religion in that “spiritual need” kind of way. She isn’t the confessional, maybe-you-can-empathize-with-my-spiritual-dilemma religious poet. At the base of any Elizabeth Robinson book is the problematic. And while religion must be problematic, as any spiritually competent person would recognize, the problematic, for Robinson, is more a position worthy of investigation. Let spirituality be a paradox representing both a presence (an undeniable presence, as the religious would say) and an absence (a profound absence), and then take the rational investigation of these two opposites to its paradoxical conclusion. How does Robinson’s book On Ghosts fit into that? It is literally about ghosts. “This is an essay on the phenomenon of ghosts and haunting.” Robinson declares at the beginning of the book.

Which is as much to say that On Ghosts is about presence and absence. And while this could be considered from a religious perspective (after all, how do the faithful experience God), the book appears to be more invested in the concept of ghost as analogy for the practice of language. In the poem/essay section, “Getaway,” Robinson makes this analogy explicit:

You can arrange the page and enumerate all the propositions you like, but this is a page, and words may irritate its surface, dog-ear and crease it, but they will never truly impact the surface, and they will never escape their page.

This kind of direct statement, however, is maybe a little uncharacteristic. Its actual practice of comparing ghost to language is much more varied and subtle and expressive and affecting. Consider the anecdote Robinson tells about sending a letter to her grandmother who, as the letter was being sent through the mail, died. If Robinson’s aunt then has a conversation with her about the contents of the letter that had been addressed to the grandmother, is this an instance of her grandmother’s ghost? How much can language that was intended for one person actually summon that person’s presence? And what if this type of “appearance” is exactly in line with the grandmother’s personality? Say, for instance, she was always “tentative” and “extremely shy.”

In Lyn Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness,” she considers how humans experience transition, trivial transition. How our daily lives are populated with any number of sensations and stimuli, and part of our conscious experience is to overlay all that we see, hear, feel or think with some structural causality. Our consciousness helps us make sense of our lives. Though the sense or logic we might infer from this so-called “causality” may not be all that sensible, we are at least accustomed to this logic. In fact, we have labeled this logic our “stream of consciousness.” But what happens when we don’t just accept the logic of that stream of consciousness. Instead we consider the stream of consciousness just one of many different logical explanations about experience.

In other words, our skeptical response to ghosts partly comes from just wanting to live in a sensible world. A doorknob doesn’t turn unless something physically turns it (from “Incidents Five and Six”). Two gray doves appear in the morning, because gray doves are native to this locale (from “Dear Ones”). And yet, this sensible world is consistently intruded on by some presence we can’t explain. In “The Nature of Association” Robinson describes how simple sensations like the smell of Pear Soap or the feel of rough paper can call a certain person to mind. No one would say this was the person’s ghost visiting her. And yet, what is the difference between this mingling of presence with memory and the ghost of a stalker that she describes in “Incident Three”? On one level, this is how Robinson’s On Ghosts operates. Using a lyric logic to juxtapose many different scenarios involving presence and absence, and how we judge either, and through implication, to reflect on what in language is present and what absent.

But perhaps the most affecting gesture illustrating the role of presence and absence comes in the various “PHOTOGRAPHS” that appear in the book. Each “PHOTOGRAPH” follows immediately on one of the anecdotes or incidents. Its position in the book, and the style of captioning makes it feel as though it is some sort of evidence for the story that was just previous to it. In fact, Robinson’s gesture toward some photograph will make you think there is supposed to be a photograph there. It’s just missing. Here is “PHOTOGRAPH #6″:

This is an otherwise unremarkable photograph of a woman’s bare upper arm. Notice the perfectly circular pore about 4 inches from where the arm curves upward to the shoulder.

Robinson’s language assumes you are seeing the photograph of this arm. In fact, the woman being photographed is supposed to be Robinson herself, as the previous poem explains what squeezing pus out of the pore on her arm (the “circular pore” describe above) reminds her of. And so ghost language layers on appearance of ghost speaker, which layers on ghost gesture toward a photograph that is actually missing.

On Ghosts is like an introspective prism where all the colors are continually intersecting. As mentioned earlier, it proposes itself as an essay. It reads like a series of anecdotes interspersed with lyric evocations. It appears to have a progressive logic, even if that logic is consistently pushing the reader to the illogical conclusion that ghosts must exist even though ghosts can’t really exist. A statement that could be applied to language as well. And a statement that seems natural to the personal essay form, where Robinson uses the form formally pushing at both idea and form from the inside. As opposed to her treatment of the novel form in her previous book Three Novels, which felt a little too ironically positioned against or despite the novel. Here, On Ghosts‘ lyric essay complements that mysterious presence a ghost might have. It touches on the evocative nature of narrative, and pulls at what we perceive to be those concrete impressions narrative leaves inside us. For me, Robinson’s method in this essay points out precisely why we as readers need to question the presence we feel in language versus the physical evidence that it doesn’t exist. And so, if I were starting this review about how Robinson might be considered a religious poet, I have found here the rationale.

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/03/on-ghosts-by-elizabeth-robinson/feed/0The Next Monsters by Julie Doxseehttp://therumpus.net/2014/01/the-next-monsters-by-julie-doxsee/
http://therumpus.net/2014/01/the-next-monsters-by-julie-doxsee/#commentsSat, 11 Jan 2014 15:00:49 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=122566The Next Monsters today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>In Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, she instructs the reader to approach poems using what she calls a “provisional reading” method. This requires a reader to consider not only what the poem says, but also all the directions a poet could have taken when he or she was writing the poem. The intention is to have an active reading process, to maintain a permanently tentative stance toward the poem. Suddenly, the poem is a living thing, not just a set, determined meaning. The poem is an unfolding contingency. And, as readers, we appreciate what the poem is doing by considering all that the poem could have done instead. It is careful advice to follow when reading Julie Doxsee’s The Next Monsters. Though I might suggest that advice would be better reversed. For in The Next Monsters, Doxsee’s poems are often busy doing much more than I would expect to see them doing. As though their meaning is contingent upon the reader selecting the best images or dramatic situations that were written into the poems. Or, to use Kinzie’s framework, my “provisional reading” doesn’t require me to imagine what might have been included in Doxsee’s poems, as it feels as though Doxsee’s poems are already offering both the extraneous and the essential.

I would ague that Doxsee operates under a poetry of context. And by context, I am thinking about the dominant premise she uses for bundling together the images and characters for a poem, or an entire book. Not that it should be tidily bundled, but there should at least be something binding it all together so I can see how to fit together the pieces and form a meaning, however elastic or “provisional” that meaning is. But The Next Monsters contains so much information. It is dense, voluminous and sinister. It is information rich. It is impression overload. To my reading, Doxsee’s book stands at the exact boundary between sense and too much sensation or too much information. The Next Monsters is constantly falling into disassociated pieces in my mind, even while the style of the poems are not what I would expect to fall apart. I should be clear, I am normally an advocate for this kind of poetry. Anna Moschovakis’ You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake or Donna Stonecipher’s The Cosmopolitan or Brenda Coultas’ A Handmade Museum. These are books of overinformation that I will extol, that I will lose myself in. How do I distinguish The Next Monsters, then? The style reminds me, actually, of these newish sculptures by the artist Carol Bove. Bove arranges sea shells using metal rods to hold them in place. The whole piece is very severe, and I often feel antagonized by the work. Why? I don’t know. I feel challenged. I feel like there is an excess of control in the pieces. And that’s what I like them for.

There are many times in The Next Monsters when I see Doxsee maintaining a balance between the arbitrary and the sensible. The “Cabin” poems, for example, where she presents a fixed set of characters. A fixed location. The poems accumulate a sense of consequence. Here, in “Cabin” [I am at the cabin. My husband has come back…], the third poem in the sequence:

Again I test each one and my thumb cramps and I throw them into a corner of the room. I didn’t see you at the pond this morning I say.

He squeegees his fingerprints across the wood. Metal grinding against metal is the sound of the lighters as I test them. I didn’t see you at the pond this morning I say.

The lighters are broken, empty, all of them. She has gold ribbons in her hair and again he doesn’t want to say he was there. I take his hand off the table and squeeze it. I ask if he wants to drown.

The entire series of “Cabin” poems operate under a conventional scenario: the speaker questions her husband’s whereabouts. In this poem, she creates a menace with the sound of metal grinding against metal. She offers him comfort while suggesting his death. For my reading, I can feel this situation, and it feels stagnant with anger and fear. On top of that, it feels taunted by that stagnance. There are set parameters, and the movement of plot throughout the sequence questions this stagnance. In fact, I would say the movement of plot is simultaneously resisted and sickened by a continually renewed set of troubled images. I admire the anxious and toxic tone here. And I admire its presence throughout The Next Monsters. When I am making sense of the book, these kinds of impressions are the very basis of it.

At other times I feel the pieces of the poem have been too self-consciously placed. And as a result, I find myself disconnected from what I think should connect these poems together. “Last” is one of a healthy handful of poems that I feel are committed to an overstylization of the image. Here is the first prose stanza of “Last”:

You come out of the ditch sunburned, wanting breakfast in continuous sunglasses. At 10:00am your facial scuff shown. Drudges make slants of the perfect light you let the low light counterfeit, champagne flat since the first pour. Pout about how air wanes. I wind up holding your long-lost suitcase in my fist after unbinding my hands. You pick me up fireman-style.

I can make the connections here. “Continuous sunglasses” connect to the rough face shown by “facial scuff,” and that connects to picking the speaker up “fireman-style.” This figuring a manly man for the poem. In addition, I can connect “low light counterfeit” with the flat champagne. And for me I see in this some muted version of what’s to be expected from any damsel-in-distress kind of scene. Why do I feel disconnected? The extended sentence conflating light with champagne. The arbitrary nature of a ditch, a drudge and the suitcase, not to mention the suitcase is only being held after the speaker’s hands are unbound. For my ear, the pieces of this poem feel too controlled in their place.

Which leads me to my biggest concern in this review. Perhaps I’m not taking Julie Doxsee’s poetry on its own terms. Should I be reading these poems the same way I view those Carol Bove structures? Do the poems intend to push the reader away, and that is part of an aesthetic tension? I came to Doxsee’s work through the long poem, “Vertigo & Bone Room” that appeared in Octopus Magazine 14. And I have since been looking for that poem, and that poem’s style, to appear in her books. All this to say, I may be biased for what I want to see in a Julie Doxsee book. Reading through Objects for a Fog Death, her previous book, I find myself with similar thoughts about how expressiveness tends to be secondary to her arrangement of images. But I like an art that can make me feel that. And that’s where I finally place Doxsee’s The Next Monsters. Why does it antagonize me so?

Related Posts:

]]>http://therumpus.net/2014/01/the-next-monsters-by-julie-doxsee/feed/0Pink Reef by Robert Fernandezhttp://therumpus.net/2013/12/pink-reef-by-robert-fernandez/
http://therumpus.net/2013/12/pink-reef-by-robert-fernandez/#commentsWed, 18 Dec 2013 15:00:42 +0000http://therumpus.net/?p=121918Pink Reef today in Rumpus Poetry.]]>Can there please be a petition that Robert Fernandez change the title to his second book, Pink Reef? I was thinking Sensitive Soul. I don’t care the ridiculous presumption this implies. For instance, what poet of the 21st Century would dare have the word “soul” in his title. What reviewer would dare suggest to a poet who is so obviously sophisticated in the craft of poetry and the delicate balance between irony and sincerity that marks the 21st Century attitude toward sincerity, what reviewer would insist on such an ill-conceived and unsolicited suggestion? And why would said reviewer not at least show some artfulness in his suggestion?

Because there is something in Pink Reef that is speaking so delicately, so sincerely, so tenderly, I want Fernandez’s book announced to the world with an explicit sign that marks its true content. There is a soul at work in this book. And when I say “soul” I bring with it all that 1990s poetry baggage that workshops and misdirected earnestnesses have been piling on top of it. But why? Why do I need to put the word “soul” in place of a title that is already being so subtle about its comment on self / soul? Pink, I like to read, referring to a human biology color and reef a live structure that lives just below the surface.

Perhaps it’s for my own nostalgia. That feeling when I was first learning poetry, and I could feel the tender hooks of a poem attach to that complicated sensitivity I am so happy lives below my surface. How vulnerable poems made and still make me feel. How emotionally exposed. This is what I’m hearing when I connect “poetry” to “soul.” This is why, Robert Fernandez, if you are listening, I make this possibly unwelcome request. You have brought soul to my soul in your Pink Reef. And I am only asking all readers of the world be notified, beckoned, induced or whatever action a title is doing when it’s attached to a book.

Does all of this sound self-involved? You must not have read Fernandez’s book. Pink Reef is a living of poetry, a living with poetry, a living about living, a living being, a living living itself out. Something inside this voice exploits my self-involvement, makes me feel that the voice I am hearing has been speaking inside me for longer than just this poem was going on. Here is the section [eat glass,]:

I don’t even know where to start the list of what this poem risks. It risks repeating itself. There is so little language that it’s working with. And yet the repetition not only appears natural. It appears essential to the poem’s sentiment. And what is that sentiment? Wound. A physically felt emotional wound. And here is the largest risk of all. The poem risks preciousness.

Oh, the dilemma of preciousness. Sometimes it feels like all the wrong poets get to write precious poems, and the rest of us are left with little ironic nuggets to distinguish ourselves. Of course, this is an exaggeration. I am mainly reacting against books that use personal catastrophe as the book’s “theme” without appreciating that a catastrophic event is not going to feel tragic unless the book is equipped with the right language, a circumspect credibility and a speaker who is humble before his or her own trauma. I want the sense of tragedy built by the poet, not assumed. Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang is catastrophic and tragic. My Alexandria, by Mark Doty is catastrophic and tragic. Sancta, by Andrew Grace, yes, catastrophic and tragic. The other books, the books I object to, are “catastrophic” in that precious, cloying, exploitative, presumptive way that makes me sad for poems. The mere fact that the catastrophe occurred and affected this poet, who has now written these heavy-handed poems, should not prove sufficient for these poems to affect a wide audience. Please, catastrophic poets, be courageous enough to not only write about your personal tragedy, but also to create a vivid and dynamically felt sense of that tragedy for your reader. I am that reader. And I am tired of feeling guilted into assigning poetic worth to a book of poems whose only compelling quality is that the poet experienced trauma.

Is Pink Reef about catastrophe, then? Only in the most abstracted way. And the risk toward preciousness is just that we are asked to see a speaker suffering, but without any real understanding of why. Do we need to understand why? Is Fernandez interested in giving us a clue? Is Fernandez playing an ironic game with sentimentality? These are the questions I ask. And there are few places to look for an answer. His first book We Are Pharaoh feels more invested in gamesmanship. “We” are speakers. “We” rule. “We” are erratically pointing fingers at every corner of the landscape. I might offer up Pharoah‘s “Action Persisting Past Restraint” as a poem with a similar voice to Pink Reef. It even makes a brief reference to “reefs.” The speaker here is sensitive and soulful. I could argue the poem is prototypical for what I find throughout Pink Reef. But that doesn’t resolve the source of the speaker’s suffering. Is it an ironic pose? If it is ironic pose, should that make it any less true? Consider this quote from “[knowing to see],” found towards the end of Pink Reef:

knowing is to see& to remain tragicat the heartof where we are to goknowing is to platethe stomach in teak& to remain tragic in theheart of where we are to go

I could make every argument that Fernandez is posturing in this poem. The repetition. The speaker’s unambiguous reference to “heart” and “tragedy.” But these are the same reasons I used for praising the poem I quote above. They are the same reasons I would praise this poem.

Which is to say Pink Reef can unqualifiedly be called a melancholy delight. The book is a feeling that uses words I would have assumed had lost the poetic feelingness to them, that elaborates on wound and woundedness while holding back that most important part of the wound–its source. Do not try to figure out Robert Fernandez, just listen and listen to Pink Reef. What is the voice in a human biology? What is it saying? To some degree, you’re never going to answer these questions no matter the circumstance.